Pragmatism,Instrumental Value Theory and Social Economics

In an effort to restore trust in the banking sector, the Advisory Committee on the Future of Banks in the Netherlands made a recommendation, which has since been adopted, that bank executives be required to swear an oath akin to the physician's Hippocratic Oath. This examination of the prospects of the Dutch banker's oath addresses two broad issues. One issue is the efficacy of oaths themselves as instruments for achieving the desired end. A second issue concerns the extent to which this particular oath is a useful guide to ethical banking practice. One conclusion of this study is that it would be difficult for any oath in banking to serve a role that is analogous to the Hippocratic Oath in medicine because of the many dissimilarities involved, most notably the lack in banking of a singular focus on service. Second, the Dutch oath, while admirable in its lofty exhortations, fails to provide a reliable guide through the many difficult judgments that must be made in banking.     

银行业市场准入监管及其绩效的实证分析

比较各国银行业的市场准入监管可以发现,监管的严格程度大相径庭,但从根本上是保护竞争与限制竞争的原则差异。通过对各国银行业市场准入监管及其绩效的实证分析,发现严格的准入监管与银行发展、产业效率负相关,但与银行危机正相关。文章回顾中国银行业的市场准入监管后,认为放松准入监管将有助于我国银行业发展,并就提高放松准入监管绩效的路径进行了探讨。     

Exploring the effect of crisis on cooperatives: a Bayesian performance analysis of French craftsmen cooperatives

ABSTRACT

The aim of this paper is to understand the economic performance of craftsmen cooperatives during the crisis period. These cooperatives have the distinctive feature of being supply cooperatives. We use an exhaustive dataset for the French craftsmen cooperatives (2004–2014). We estimate Bayesian Translog econometric models in order to underline the impact of the 2008 crisis on these cooperatives. On the one hand, cooperatives’ turnover and economies of scales decrease during the crisis, the effect is lower for elder cooperatives and varies across sectors. On the other hand, there is a convergence towards the mean for the various generations of cooperatives. These findings are robust to alternative econometric specifications.     

现代网络银行发展中的金融监管思考

网络银行是技术进步与金融产业相结合的产物，给传统中央银行监管提出了新课题。本文分析了网络银行对监管体制的挑战，概括介绍了国际实践经验与通行做法，结合我国网络银行发展的现实国情，提出了构建适应我国网络银行发展的金融监控体系设想。     

The Relationship between Anthropology and Economics

This article provides an institutional perspective on a recent effort by the author to develop a comprehensive empirical model of the “high-tech” sector of the Texas economy.¹ The model is unique in that it incorporates institutional phenomena into econometric analysis. This approach has been suggested by the author in previous work.²     

自生能力、经济转型与新古典经济学的反思

现有的新古典经济学理论体系把企业具有自生能力作为暗含的前提。但是 ,转型中国家和其他许多发展中国家的企业却因政府的赶超愿望 ,进入不具比较优势的产业而不具自生能力。当经济中大量企业缺乏自生能力时 ,实行根据新古典经济学所制定的改革或转型政策 ,往往达不到预期效果 ,而且 ,可能给社会带来巨大痛苦。本文主张 ,在分析社会主义经济、转型经济和发展经济问题时 ,放弃现有的新古典经济学体系中企业具有自生能力的暗含前提 ,把企业是否具有自生能力作为一个具体的考虑变量 ,这是新古典经济学理论的必要发展。     

中国银行业绩效生态的实证分析

本文在中国银行业转型和开放的双重背景下，选取四大国有银行与十家股份制银行作为研究对象，采用1994～2002年的面板数据，实证探究中国银行业的绩效生态以及国有银行与股份制银行绩效差异的决定机制，从比较中寻找差距，探讨国有银行的改革之路。     

Social Economics and Evolutionary Learning

The major premise of this paper is that social and individual well-being depends significantly on people's capacity to learn and unlearn in communication with each other. This paper builds on social economic traditions that see communication and conversation as evolutionary generative and adaptive mechanisms through which individual and social learning occurs. Drawing on educational psychology and organizational behavior scholarship, five dynamic processes of conversational learning are introduced with the contention that they can help social economists understand at a micro level more deeply and more concretely how learning happens in the give-and-take of conversation. The paper explores the role of the state, organizations, and communities in fostering individual freedom and dignity, human rights, and economic democracy and concludes that the investment of value in people and their capability for purposeful action as social economic stakeholders can be enhanced through conversation as learning.     

关于中国经济学学科建设与发展的几点思考

中国必须有自己的经济学,中国经济学的基础学科地位不能弱化。加强中国经济学的基础学科地位要理顺中国经济学与西方经济学、马克思主义经济、邓小平理论等相关课程的关系,拓宽中国经济学的对象,加厚中国经济理论基础,初步构建中国经济学理论体系等。     

Polarities between Naturalism and Non-Naturalism in Contemporary Economics: An Overview

We provide a dynamic model of banking competition, in which bounded rationality of some competitors explains how the credit cycle is intensified. We model the economic cycle following Tobias F. Rötheli (2012b), who argues that boundedly rational banks, in their Bayesian learning, overestimate the probability of success during booms and underestimate it during recessions. We obtain three main results. First, the model suggests that pessimism/underconfidence is not a powerful driver of credit cycles. Instead, it supports the conclusion that it is euphoria during large upswings that leads to the next crunch. Second, the dynamization of the model provides further insight into the way boundedly rational competition intensifies the credit cycle. Third, it additionally predicts that the effects of behavioral biases are more pervasive when the quality of the niche markets is lower.     

Social Economics and Risk Analysis

Risk analysis studies the likelihood and potential severity of harm created by a hazard. Research suggests that public “paranoia” about environmental risks is a product of mistrust, and that perceptions should carry weight in public policy. Application of social economic's “dual self” framework suggests that the willingness-to-pay approach to deciding whether risk reduction efforts are economical is flawed in its presumption against public values, its bias against the poor and the unborn, and its neglect of risk prevention. If comparative risk analysis can minimize rent-seeking and view environmental protection as an investment good, it may improve environmental policy.     

Interactions on Job and Employee Effort within Italian Social Cooperatives

The aim of this paper is to analyse, using a standard ordered probit model, the correlates of worker effort within Italian social cooperatives. The main assumption of the paper is that employee effort depends not only on standard variables that explain effort but also on employees’ interpersonal relationships on the job. The analysis adds a new piece of evidence to the extant literature on effort, i.e. the impact of on-the-job interpersonal relationships on effort. The results show that there exists a positive correlation between the quantity and quality of worker relations within the social enterprise with customers, volunteers, colleagues and superiors and effort.     

投资经济管理专业定位和课程设置问题的思考

本文针对目前投资专业专业性不强,不能适应社会发展需要,提出专业的发展机遇,指出专业改造和课程设置的方向,将投资经济管理专业改造成工程造价管理专业.     

Centering Social Economics on Human Dignity 1

The paper explores a social economics centered on the normative value of human dignity. The first part of the paper explores the philosophical meaning of the concept. In the process, great weight is given to Alan Gewirth's “dialectically necessary argument” for human dignity, grounding the concept in human agency. The second part explores some of the apparent major implications: a rejection of both positive methodology and cultural relativism; the questioning of economic rationality and the efficiency norm; much of commercial advertising; and cost-benefit analysis. It also serves as a critique of the Kaldor-Hicks criterion, the institution of the wage system and of an unqualified application of cost-benefit analysis.     

Social Surplus Approach and Heterodox Economics

Given the emphasis on social provisioning in heterodox economics, two of its central theoretical organizing principles are the concepts of the total social product and the social surplus. This appears to link heterodox economics to the social surplus approach associated with the classical economists and currently with Sraffian economists. However, heterodox economics connects agency with the social surplus and the social product, which the Sraffians reject as they take the level and composition of the social product as given. Therefore the different theoretical approach regarding the social surplus taken in heterodox economics may generate a different but similar way of theorizing about a capitalist economy. To explore this difference is the aim of the article.     

Social Economics and Evolutionary Institutionalism Today

This paper discusses theoretical and methodological elements that constitute social economics. It also considers those elements for evolutionary (Veblenian) institutional economics. It investigates how these “heterodoxies” may further converge. Such convergence would probably not trigger a complete unification, but lead to a broadly defined common research program and a strategy for joint “heterodox” survival, in face of the ranking game of the neoclassical “mainstream” and of the dominant powers supporting it as the discipline providing ideological legitimization. A common denominator of “heterodoxies” in terms of real-world orientation, direct interdependency and interaction of agents (social decision situations), appropriate complexity, and the treatment of values is drafted. Theoretical concepts discussed include complex and open systems, individual agency, institutions, embeddedness, networks, social reform, and process orientation. Formal methodological developments considered are complex modeling, game theory, or computer simulations. We arrive at a more formal common basis, which we term socio-economics. We also consider the relations of evolution and institutions, the institutional dichotomy, and the theory of institutional change. The monism of the “market” of the “mainstream” turns out to dissolve into the institutional diversity of real-world network forms, which helps explaining real-world forms of markets, hierarchies, or spatial clusters. Focuses of “heterodox” convergence will have to be the related “microfoundations” and “macrofoundations” projects, integrating an interdisciplinary “naturalistic” approach to genetic-cultural co-evolution of cooperation, and social reform. While modern socio-economics makes “heterodoxies” leading in economic research, their future still appears open between ideological cleansing and extinction through the mainstream, and proactive paradigmatic pluralism.     

Social Provisioning as a Starting Point for Feminist Economics

The past decade has seen a proliferation of writing by feminist economists. Feminist economists are not identified with one particular economic paradigm, yet some common methodological points seem to be emerging. I propose making these starting points more explicit so that they can be examined, critiqued, and built upon. I use the term “social provisioning” to describe this emerging methodology. Its five main components are: incorporation of caring and unpaid labor as fundamental economic activities; use of well-being as a measure of economic success; analysis of economic, political, and social processes and power relations; inclusion of ethical goals and values as an intrinsic part of the analysis; and interrogation of differences by class, race-ethnicity, and other factors. The paper then provides brief illustrations of the use of this methodology in analyses of US welfare reform, gender and development, and feminist ecological economics.     

Banking structure and financial stability: a comparison of Chinese and German banking systems

In the process of financial globalization and diversification, the issue of financial stability has become heated all over the world. This paper attempts to uncover the delicate relationship between banking structure and financial stability by comparing and analyzing the situation of the Chinese and German banking systems. This paper suggests that (i) the trade-off between competition and concentration in banking industry is a vital factor to maintain financial stability and (ii) concentration is not always a bad thing for financial stability, especially in banking systems with discontent bank performance.     

外资银行对国内银行业"组合绩效"的影响机制

文章梳理了外资银行的进入对东道国银行业绩效的影响机制,并以我国银行业中全国性商业银行、地方城市商业银行、信用社以及中外合资银行为样本,就外资银行进入对样本银行的经营费用、盈利能力和银行效率等"组合绩效"指标的影响进行实证分析。在对1998-2005年79家国内银行的面板数据进行了分类估计后发现:(1)外资银行进入的增加导致国内银行管理费用增加;(2)外资银行进入的增加促使国内银行的盈利能力提高;(3)伴随着外资银行的进入,银行竞争不断加剧银行效率也呈现出降低的趋势。